Sloan lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Fortune reporter Sheryl Estrada about the implications of workslop, “AI-generated content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” “Ultimately, serious senior management will demand workslop metrics the same way they demand quality metrics,” says Schrage. “They’ll use LLMs to detect slop patterns in computational tasks—essentially, you’ll fight AI with AI.”
Prof. Kerri Cahoy speaks with New York Times reporter Katrina Miller about the risks to satellites during geomagnetic storms. Cahoy explains that satellites in low-Earth orbit can experience anomalies, like signal dropouts and reboots. But molecules in Earth’s atmosphere and the strength of its magnetic field can offer some natural protection for satellites closest to the ground.
Nature reporter James Mitchell Crow spotlights Prof. Leonard Guarente’s work studying the impact of calorie restriction in life expectancy. Guarente’s research points to “the importance of a set of genes and associated proteins called sirtuins.” Guarente says: “If you make them more active, you extend the lifespan.”
Yuly Fuentes-Medel of the MIT Climate Project speaks with Fast Company reporter Elizabeth Segran about how encouraging collaboration between shoe manufacturers could help increase shoe recycling. “The shoe industry is competitive, and these brands are rivals,” says Fuentes-Medel. “But by sharing costs, data, and infrastructure, they can achieve the sustainability goals that have eluded them for years.”
Luke Hobson, assistant director of Industrial Design for MIT xPRO, speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Joshua Kim about his academic and professional journey in the field of online learning design. “Through all of my seldom successes and many, many failures, I learned a thing or two along the way, and I decided to start sharing these stories online,” says Hobson. “It began with answering questions in Facebook groups, which eventually turned into a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a book and more. What I discovered through sharing these moments is that I developed a love for teaching about instructional design.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston 25 reporter Amal Elhewl about the anticipated rise in healthcare premiums. Gruber predicts “prices could jump by as much as $25,000 a year for people like small business owners or entrepreneurs,” Elhewl explains. “If 4 to 5 million people lose health insurance, we’re talking about on the order of 5,000 extra deaths every year because we have not extended these subsidies,” adds Gruber.
Prof. Laura Lewis speaks with New Scientist reporter Grace Wade about the importance of sleep research. Lewis notes that understanding the dynamics of how the brain transitions into sleep could help lead to new treatments for insomnia. “With sleep onset, it has been really difficult for us to find that moment,” says Lewis, where brain mechanisms drive the transition to sleep. “If we knew when that was, then we could start to say, what is the brain region or circuit that is making somebody fall asleep?”
Prof. Emeritus Tim Berners-Lee speaks with The Verge’s Decoder host Nilay Patel about his hopes and concerns for the future of the world wide web. “In the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website,” explains Lee. “That feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all of the other people on the web, that is what were still fighting for and what we need to rebuild.”
CNBC reporter Natalie Wu spotlights Sonia Raman, longtime MIT women’s basketball coach, who has recently been named the next head coach for the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. On her time at MIT, Raman says: “I felt like I was betting on myself, investing in my own growth and my own passion for what I really wanted to do. I also just felt like I was impacting people’s lives in a way that was much more fulfilling to me than anything I had done before.”
Researchers at MIT have discovered “the most direct evidence to date of unconventional superconductivity in ‘magic-angel’ twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG), reports Aman Tripathi for Interesting Engineering. “This finding is a crucial step in the global search for room-temperature superconductors, often referred to as the ‘Holy Grail’ of physics,” writes Tripathi.
MIT researchers have developed a “printable aluminum alloy that can withstand high temperatures and is five times stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminum,” reports Andrew Corselli for Tech Briefs. “The researchers envision that the new printable aluminum could be made into stronger, more lightweight and temperature-resistant products, such as fan blades in jet engines,” Corselli explains.
Prof. Tess Smidt and incoming Prof. Lindsey Raymond have been named Schmidt Sciences 2025 AI2050 Early Career Fellows, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. The AI2050 project is “aimed at advancing the capacity of artificial intelligence to tackle an evolving list of 10 ‘hard problems,’ involving major scientific questions, technical issues, and risks associated with revolutionary technology,” explains Nietzel.
Sonia Raman, who served as the MIT women’s basketball coach for 12 seasons, has been named the next coach of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, reports Andrew Destin for the Associated Press. During her career at MIT, Raman “led the school to the Division III NCAA Tournament twice and remains the winningest coach in program history,” writes Destin.
Writing for Meteorological Technology International, Alex Pack explores how MIT researchers have developed a new “lightning-prediction model that could help protect more unconventional aircraft designs – such as blended-wing bodies or truss-braced configurations – as aviation moves beyond traditional tube-and-wing designs.”
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the International Space Station (ISS), Earth.com reporter Derek Davis spotlights the contributions of a number of MIT-trained astronauts and engineers, who played pivotal roles in the ISS’ history.